State Leadership vs. Lawyers’ Entrepreneurship: the Globalization Trajectories of Chinese Legal Professionals under the Belt & Road Initiative

Abstract

Based on the analysis of the online profiles of 205 BRI Talent Bank lawyers as accredited by China’s national bar association, this article generates important empirical knowledge about the approaches and processes that a nation state may use in directing the internationalization of the legal professionals. In addition to designing the general roadmap and offering broad incentives, the state has shown a much more hands-on presence. By pooling in the so-called “state adjacent” lawyers and commissioning them to take some concrete first steps spelled out in the roadmap, the Chinese state effectively envisions them as role models for the other lawyers to follow the suit, so as to ensure that its policy goals about the BRI are achieved in the Chinese legal profession. Such vision, however, is not very well realized as expected, which is particularly evidenced by the zero accession rate of Talent Bank law firms into the state-led BRI Lawyers Association initiative. These findings reaffirm that Chinese lawyers are calculative and pragmatic entrepreneurs, who know where to strike the balance between winning legitimacy from the state and pursuing their own internationalization trajectories based on their own needs and competence. Perhaps contrary to the expectations of the state, such image does not seem to change much even when we are speaking of a group of lawyers that have close ties with and/or hold official approvals from the state.